Leah fell into a comfortable routine so readily, it surprised her. There was no need to adjust to the unfamiliar landscape, to the wide expanse of the desert sky with its crisp air, or to her new life, which was so dramatically different from her old one. Not that she was living la vida loca. If anything, her life was more contained than it had ever been. But the routines immediately felt familiar rather than new.
Mornings, she got up before light and sat at the little table on the front porch, watching the sunrise while she did her daily journaling as recommended in The Artist’s Way. She hadn’t followed this exercise in ages, but she took it up again on her first morning. She wrote down whatever came to mind without trying to censor herself or edit, and without reading it back immediately.
She covered a lot of ground in those entries, from her guilt—and yes, anger—about Aimee, to the convoluted feelings she had about the Diesel Rats, especially now that she knew that it really was Jackson Cole living the life of a hermit out here in the Hierro Maderas.
Aimee still mattered. She tried to write past the guilt and resentment, to before her friend had died. Before Aimee’s mother had given her that damned journal to read. It still didn’t make sense. Not how Aimee could put on a cheerful and fearless face to the outside world while hiding so much pain inside. Not how she’d never come to Leah to share that pain. And especially not how Leah herself had remained oblivious to it while Aimee fell into an ever-darker spiral of depression.
She wanted to remember the best of her friend, but she didn’t know where to start, because the truth was, she’d never known the real Aimee.
If all of that wasn’t enough, she also had to struggle with the reality of magic. The otherworld. Animal people. It all seemed so preposterous, but as day followed day, this whole supernatural view of the world seemed more real than her old life back in Newford. Where—sidebar—according to Marisa, there were just as many magical goings on, but she’d been oblivious to those as well.
By the time she finished writing in her journal, she would hear Aggie stirring. She’d put the kettle on and have fresh tea and breakfast ready by the time the older woman came into the kitchen.
The rest of the morning she’d spend with Aggie, soaking up the old woman’s knowledge of the area, her tribe, and the neighbouring ma’inawo. Sometimes Aggie would have Leah flip through her paintings until they found the one that illustrated some point or other.
After lunch, Aggie would rest and Leah would work on research, on one of her blogs, or simply catch up with her friends back in Newford. She talked to Marisa on the phone at least every day and they texted regularly. It was hard explaining her sudden absence to her other friends, but most were supportive. Jilly was positively giddy with excitement and extracted the promise of an invitation to visit as soon as Leah had her own place.
“I won’t be in the way,” she’d assured Leah on the phone one day. “I’ll just be off painting.” Short pause. “And hanging out with animal people!”
Her voice had gone steadily up in pitch with that last bit.
That was so Jilly. Give her a hint of magic and she was off and running.
“I hate to break this to you,” Leah said, “but they’re not all just waiting around with bated breath for you to show up. You know that, right?”
“Oh, don’t be a spoilsport. I’ll be on my best behaviour. I’ll walk around all humble and without a smidgeon of prodding and prying.”
Leah could only respond with a laugh.
When she had to go online, she used the hotspot on her cell phone to connect her laptop to the Internet since cell reception was decent out here and all Aggie had was a land line. Her data plan was good, but she still kept her online presence to a minimum.
Dinner, they ate out on the front porch watching the sunset. That was when visitors usually came by, including Reuben or Thomas, who dropped off groceries every other day. Leah wasn’t sure if all the evening visitors were human, but they all looked human. A few she recognized from Aggie’s paintings, minus their long rabbit ears, pronged horns, forked snake tongues, or whatever other elements of their animal selves that Aggie had put into the paintings.
And of course there were always dogs, mostly outside, but from time to time one would wander into the house, and then Leah would get a pang and remember what Reuben’s nephew had told her: that Ruby had been eaten by a witch.
Morago and Steve were the most frequent visitors. Sometimes they showed up on the same evening, sometimes on their own. Calico accompanied Steve whenever he came, and that made Leah happy. It was one thing for him to disappear from the outside world. She could understand his reasons because she was doing pretty much the same thing herself. But exiling himself didn’t mean he had to be alone.
She was grateful for how everyone made her feel so welcome. No, that wasn’t quite it. Normally, amidst a group of old friends, it would be easy to feel like the odd woman out. Not because anyone would deliberately exclude her, but because it would have been so easy for them to fall into old habits, talking about unfamiliar people or long-past incidents. She would have been happy enough to sit quietly in a corner of the porch and listen to them talk, but one or another of them always included her, explaining who or what they were talking about.
The first evening that Steve, Calico and Morago dropped by, they later fell into a companionable silence until Steve shifted in his chair. “Where’s Ruby?” he asked Aggie. “I haven’t seen her around.”
Aggie sighed. “She offered herself to an hechicera.”
Morago sat up straighter and gave her a sharp look.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Steve asked.
“It means,” Aggie said, “that when Sadie got into more trouble after that business in the police station, Ruby traded her own freedom for Sadie’s.”
“So, when Reuben’s nephew told me she was eaten,” Leah said, “he wasn’t being literal, right?”
“He might as well have been,” Aggie said. “The witch owns her soul. Ruby will never be free of her.”
“Is this true?” Steve asked Morago.
“I need to know more,” the shaman said. “What hechicera are we talking about?”
“Manny can explain it all,” Aggie told them. “He was there when it happened.”
Steve glanced at Calico, then got up from his chair. The dogs all stirred, lifting their heads at the movement before settling down again. “I need to talk to Manny,” he said.
Calico nodded. “I liked Ruby.” Her lips curled up for a moment and showed far too many pointed teeth, then became a humourless smile. “And I’ve never eaten an hechicera’s heart before.”
“Be careful,” Morago said.
“I know, I know. You don’t want any blowback on the tribe. But you don’t have to worry about that. This is a ma’inawo problem, and we’ll handle it our way.”
“What I meant,” Morago said, “is that kind of a witch can be formidable.”
Calico smiled. “That’s sweet,” she told him as she rose and joined Steve.
Leah watched the pair go off into the darkness.
“So,” she overheard Steve say they walked away. “I know how you want to go about this. Do you feel like hearing my take?”
Calico’s laughter trailed off as the two moved out of Leah’s hearing. She turned back to Morago and Aggie.
“Was she serious about that?” she asked. “Eating somebody’s heart?”
Morago shrugged.
“The thing people forget,” Aggie said, “is that the ma’inawo can be formidable, too.”
Leah sighed and settled back into her seat. “So witches are real,” she said almost to herself, “and horrible. I don’t know why that should be a surprise.”
“There are witches and then there are witches,” Morago said. “Among the tribes—the Navajo, the Kikimi, the Hopi—witches are creatures of pure evil. They’re the main reason we have Reuben’s dog boys as part of the Warrior Society. They protect the tribe against all manner of threats. But outside the tribes, the question becomes trickier. The Wiccan witches are earth worshippers, more like hippies—you get on their bad side by not sorting your recycling properly.”
“Morago,” Aggie said.
“So I exaggerate. The point is they aren’t evil. Nor is a bruja, at least not necessarily.”
“Which type is the old woman in the barrio that people call Abuela?” Aggie asked.
Morago turned to her, thoughtful. “If she’s an hechicera it means she’s bad medicine. They’re more like a sorceress than a witch. A bruja would never mess around trying to control spirits.”
“So how do we stop her?” Leah asks.
Morago shakes his head. “Damned if I know, but something needs to be done about Ruby’s situation.”
By the second week, Aggie had returned to working afternoons in her studio. Leah would join her, sitting out of the way with her laptop open, but more often than not, she watched Aggie painting and didn’t do much writing.
When she did write, she divided her time between the book she’d promised Alan and her new blog about the plight of undocumented migrants in this part of the country. Ernie had come by one afternoon and they’d talked for so long that she was late getting dinner on the table. Since then, they’d exchanged a flurry of emails until Leah finally put up her new blog post. There was some good feedback, but a dismaying amount of racism and hate mail in the comments. Ernie assured her that the intense response showed she was doing something right, and he offered to introduce her to some people who could help her better understand the situation.
The book was easier to work on than she’d anticipated. Her morning journaling brought it all back: her friendship with Aimee, along with the part that the Diesel Rats played in her life both before and after Aimee’s death. But while it wasn’t hard to get the words down, the writing was so raw that she wasn’t sure she could ever show it to anyone. The idea of Alan and Marisa reading it was hard enough. Even more terrifying was the notion of complete strangers having an intimate look at her private life and innermost thoughts.
One afternoon, she looked up from her computer screen while rereading a particularly hard section. She’d been writing about the time just after Aimee’s mother had given her Aimee’s journal. From across the room, she saw that Aggie had turned from her canvas and was regarding her with worried eyes.
“Sometimes,” Aggie said, “I see you writing and you seem filled with so much pride at what you’re accomplishing. But then there are times such as this, when it appears that every word is a cholla thorn digging its barb deeper under your skin.”
That was exactly what it felt like, Leah thought, having brushed up against those tenacious thorns a few times during her walks in the surrounding desert—except these barbs were in her heart.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Aggie asked.
“Not really.”
But she found herself telling the old woman the whole story all the same. There was something about Aggie that made her a natural confidante. Leah wasn’t sure what it was, but she’d felt comfortable in the older woman’s presence from the moment she’d first met her.
She waited now for Aggie to say something, but the older woman sat quietly after Leah was done. Aggie looked out the window before she finally nodded to herself and looked at Leah again. “Everything’s a story,” she said. “Not just our memories. Every part of our lives—how we interact with each other, how all the Wheels turn in our lives. Have you thought of telling this as a story in another way, rather than as a personal memoir?”
“You mean, like fiction? I should make it up?”
Aggie shook her head. “No, tell the same story, but pretend it belongs to someone else just to give yourself some distance from how it affects you.”
“Isn’t that side-stepping the issue? It doesn’t seem honest.”
Aggie didn’t argue the point. She let her hand trail down to muss the fur of the dog sleeping beside her chair.
“Let me tell you a story,” she said. “A long time ago, there was a woman of the People who fell in love with a man who was not a man.”
“He was a ma’inawo?”
Aggie nodded. “But he was like Steve’s Calico. His mother was a Gila monster and his sire was a wolf.”
“How does that even work?”
“They met and mated as five-fingered beings. Now be quiet, and listen to the story.”
She smiled to take any possible sting out of the words.
This happened in the days before the Europeans came to us from across the mountains in the east, even before the Spaniards came up from the south. The desert people lived on the banks of the San Pedro River, which they called Sand River, and there wasn’t much interaction between them and the ma’inawo. They traded with other tribes. Sometimes war parties raided another tribe’s camp. But mostly, it was a peaceful existence.
The woman in this story—let’s call her Running Deer—was the youngest of three daughters. She was what we would call a tomboy today, but back then she was considered a wild girl. Every chance she got, she went off into the desert—exploring, walking, searching for she didn’t know what. She was fearless until the day she got her foot trapped in a crevice over by Yellowrock Canyon.
I told you that there wasn’t much interaction between the ma’inawo and the desert people, but some of the ma’inawo clans held more animosity toward us than others. In those days the crows were the worst, and there she was, her foot ensnared in a crevice, and those crow boys gathering around, mocking her, poking at her with sticks, building up their courage to do who knows what.
It could have gone very bad for her if he hadn’t come upon the scene. Let’s call him Walks Alone, a ma’inawo of two clans, but she saw only a handsome boy her own age who could have come from any of the villages along the banks of Sand River.
He drove off the crow boys. He extracted her foot from that crevice with a gentleness she didn’t think was possible. Then, because her ankle hurt so much, he carried her home, where he was welcomed by her family and the tribe.
He didn’t stay, but he returned from time to time. That wasn’t so strange in those days. Even then, there were restless youth who had to see what lay beyond the next mountain before they could settle back on the land where they were born, and the desert people simply assumed he was one of them.
What Running Deer’s family didn’t know was that their daughter and Walks Alone saw each other much more frequently that anyone else might imagine. Once her ankle was healed, Running Deer continued her desert rambles, but now when she was out of sight of the village, Walks Alone would appear as if out of nowhere and fall into step beside her.
It was months before he told her what he was, and by then she didn’t care. She was as much in love with him as he was with her. And once she knew and accepted him, their rambles went farther afield than any of the other desert people who had travelled before her.
He began to take her into the ghost lands, deep into the otherworld.
A little known facet of this other place that exists so close to our own, is that the more time humans spend there, the more they are changed. Some go a little crazy, some go a lot, but others thrive. Those that do well live longer and healthier lives than if they had never ventured.
This is where the Europeans got their ideas about their Faerieland, only it’s all the same place. Puck’s just Coyote in a different guise. Oberon and Titania are our elder thunders. Their gnomes and hobs are our prickly pear boys and crows.
Time moves differently on the other side. The otherworld is actually an onion of worlds, each skin peeling back a different layer to reveal yet another world. In some places, years pass in what are only minutes here. In others, a few days can be a decade.
Sometimes, after months of travelling, they would return to that village on the dry banks of the Sand River to find that only a few days had passed. Other times, they would cross over for a few minutes and lose a month. But although Running Deer worried about losing the best years of her family’s lives, she worried more about not being with Walks Alone.
Such places they explored; such beings they encountered. Ma’inawo clans Running Deer had never imagined. Tribes of five-fingered beings that lived a hundred years ago, or would not begin their lives for another hundred years. They met thunders, tall and unfathomable, and spirits so tiny that a dozen could caper on the flat palm of Running Deer’s hand.
It was a time of wonder and beauty. Running Deer was no longer the dark-haired girl of the desert people that she had been when first she met Walks Alone. She was changed. Not quite a ma’inawo herself, but like the animal people, her life was long and sickness had become a stranger. A hundred years old and she still looked much the same as that girl she had been.
The Wheel of her life had grown so tall that she could no longer see the beginning or the end of it anymore. But she was content. It didn’t matter that sometimes the journey was hard, and sometimes easy. That sometimes the weather was foul, and sometimes it was fair. That sometimes they had too little to eat, and sometimes too much. All that mattered was that they were together.
But then…oh then. Disaster.
Ma’inawo live long and can heal themselves from many grievous wounds, but they were never immortal. Walks Alone was surefooted, but this day, he misjudged his step on a narrow ghost of a trail up in the mountains. Running Deer was behind him and reached out, but he was too far ahead. She watched him fall. She seemed to watch him for a very long time. Her mouth was open, but no sound came out. It felt as though it took a hundred years for him to fall, a hundred more for the terrible sound of the impact his body made to echo back up to her.
She stood there, balanced precariously on the path. She might have cast herself off as well, but she couldn’t resist the thought that he might have survived. He was a ma’inawo. They were strong. They healed as the desert people didn’t.
She descended at a reckless speed to reach his side, far far below. But when she finally got close to him, she saw she was too late. She could never have been there in time. A part of her had known this all along. The fall was long, the rocks unforgiving. Ma’inawo can heal, but from some wounds, not even the thunders can return.
Sinking to her knees, she cradled his broken body in her arms and knelt there, rocking back and forth, keening, her heart as broken as the man she held.
It was a long time before she could rouse herself to bury her lost love. She dragged stones from nearby gullies and arroyos, one by one, piling them up until the cairn was as tall as her own waist.
And then she walked away.
She wandered through the otherworld for years, seeing through a grey haze, keeping to herself, trying to find something to fill the bleak expanse in her chest that had once been filled with her love for Walks Alone. She searched for him on the ghost roads. She asked every man, woman and ma’inawo that she met if they had seen his spirit. She begged favour from the thunders and even tried to bargain with the fearsome spirits of the crossroads. But it was all to no avail.
The Wheel that Walks Alone had travelled ended under a cairn of stones. Fate had stolen him from her and she was alone.
When she finally accepted that, she knew she had to find another purpose to her life. So she returned to the village of her people on the banks of Sand River, but her family was long gone. The people—the village itself—was gone. Now, the desert people lived in the canyons of the Painted Lands and were called the canyon people. None of them remembered Running Deer, the girl who went away into the otherworld to be seen no more. She wasn’t even remembered as a story.
She took her lover’s name, calling herself Walks Alone. She made herself a home near those canyons, close to the tribe that only knew her as a stranger who’d come down from the mountains. And where the Women’s Council and the tribal shaman guided the tribe in their relationships with the ma’inawo, she, in turn, became a guide for the animal people, helping them traverse the ways of the five-fingered beings.
But she was a protector of the canyon people, as well. While she was no Jimmy Cholla, she befriended the pack of dog soldiers who defended the tribe from spiritual attacks, teaching them the difference between those who meant real harm, and those who were only mischief-makers and tricksters, like the crows of Yellowrock Canyon. Teaching them the medicines and mysteries that Walks Alone had taught her.
So she had purpose, but her life was very long. Generations came and went, and still she endured, growing older at a pace that was different from the tribe, as their life spans were to that of a fly. She changed her name every few decades until she no longer needed to because she’d become such a fixture in her little adobe house on the edge of the tribal lands, that no one ever wondered how it was that the same woman lived there, while the rest of the canyon people were born, had their turn on their Wheel, and then went on to walk the ghost roads to the other place where their spirits begin their next journey.
You might ask why she didn’t simply step from some cliff and join Walks Alone, meet with him again in whatever place it was that his new Wheel had taken him. But she understood that life is a gift, and it is not up to us to decide when our Wheel ends. Only the thunders know when lives begin and end, and even they answer to a greater Spirit.
But one day, she thought she was given permission to finally follow her lost love. Her body lay on its sick bed and her spirit floated in the skies above otherworldly mountains. All she had to do was let go, and this she did, only to be returned to her body once more while it healed.
She understood then that her purpose had not yet run its course. Her Wheel, so tall, so tall, was still turning. She still had years she must endure.
Leah didn’t say anything for a long time. She sat there in Aggie’s studio, her laptop forgotten, hugging herself against the chill that the story had put under her skin. One of the dogs sleeping on the floor by her feet shifted its position and she started at the movement.
“Are you—are you telling me that was you?” she finally said.
Aggie’s gaze held hers. “I’m telling you that our stories are easier to relate when we take a step back from them and tell them as though they belong to another.”
Leah gave a slow nod. “Part of my problem is that I feel like I’m writing this all down for closure, but instead it’s just bringing everything back.”
“You mean your guilt.”
Leah gave her another nod.
“I could tell you it wasn’t your fault,” Aggie said, “but you’re not ready to hear that, although a part of you already knows it. So let me tell you this instead. You can plan the best tale in your head—the perfect way things should go—but the people in your life don’t have your insight, and even if they did, they probably wouldn’t follow your plan anyway. In the end, we are each of us alone. We can offer comfort and companionship to each other—do our best to help our friends onto the road that might lead them to hope. But we can’t think or feel for them. We can’t be inside them and change the way they see the world, no matter how much it breaks our heart to watch them fall.”
Leah sighed. She thought again of the story Aggie had told her, of this immortal woman who had to live forever without her partner.
“So how do you get over it?” she asked. “The survivor’s guilt.”
“It’s never really about that. People put their traumas into little boxes in their heads. They try not to think of the bad times, or tell themselves that they’re not supposed to think about them, but it never works. You don’t get strong from ignoring what happened. You get strong through finding the mechanisms to cope.”
Aggie’s gaze grew distant for a long moment.
“Everybody deals with it differently,” she said, when she focused on Leah once more. “The one thing I’m sure of is that guilt doesn’t make you strong. You only get strong from talking, living, loving. With other people, yes, but with yourself most of all. That’s what makes you strong.”
“But how could I not have seen the bad place she was in?”
“I don’t know,” Aggie told her. “I do know that even if you had known what was happening to your friend, you couldn’t have stopped it. Only she could do that.”
“So we just let people spiral down to a place from which they can’t return?”
“Of course not,” Aggie said, a flash of annoyance in her eyes. “We do everything we can to help them. But if they hide their pain so well that we can’t see it, the fault doesn’t lie with us. And if we do see what they’re going through, we can only give them all the love and support we can muster.”
Her voice softened. “We can’t make them better. We can only stand by them.
“That is the hard part of having a friend,” she added.
She looked at her painting, then picked up the brushes from her palette and put them in a jar of turpentine. When she stood up, the three dogs in the little studio all scrambled to their feet.
“Do you want to take a walk before dinner?” she asked.
Leah nodded and closed her laptop.
“Have you ever done a sweat?” Aggie asked as they wandered out of the yard in the direction of the hidden medicine wheel.
Leah shook her head. The little pack of three dogs that had left the studio with them grew to twice that many. They ranged ahead and followed from behind, panting happily.
“The world is full of poisons,” Aggie said. “All sorts of bad medicines cloud the air, even here in these canyons, and not even the purest of heart can shield themselves from all of it. A sweat draws the poison from our bodies and lets us walk in beauty again.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Aggie smiled. “It is. I was planning a sweat before the whole business with that girl got in the way.”
She stopped at the foot of a tall saguaro with a half-dozen arms, which Leah had learned meant it was an old one. A pair of crows perched on the lowest arm.
“I think we should have another,” she said, her head tilted so that she was looking at the crows. “We’ll need a good-sized lodge, a pile of stones and lots of firewood. Water, too.”
The crows lifted from the saguaro and flew north. The dogs scattered into the scrub.
“How can I help?” Leah asked.
“There’s little for us to do,” Aggie told her. “The crows and dogs will see to it that everything’s prepared.”
Leah shaded her eyes to watch the two specks that were crows flying off. There was no sign of the dogs anymore.
“Really?” she said. “Are they all ma’inawo?”
Aggie slipped her hand into the crook of Leah’s arm and headed back to the house.
“Some are,” she said. “The ones that aren’t will pass the word along. By tomorrow morning, there will be plenty of helping hands.” She paused to give Leah a glance. “Remember when you first arrived and I said that I didn’t sense you and Marisa coming?”
Leah nodded.
“These friends of mine,” Aggie said, “are my eyes and ears beyond my home.”
“Why didn’t they sense our arrival?”
“You’ll have to ask the thunders. But I think it’s because you were instrumental in saving my life, back in the otherworld. The spirits like to keep that kind of thing away from us. I gather it’s to stop us from becoming too cocky.”
Leah tried to imagine what her old self—the person she’d been before she’d ever come to the Painted Lands—would have thought of this conversation. She’d have thought she was being put on, she decided.
“So you’re an immortal,” she said to Aggie.
Aggie smiled. “No one’s immortal, except for maybe Cody.”
“That’s Coyote, right?”
“It is. But I’ve lived awhile. Stay on here, and the years will stretch out for you.”
“Because the rez is in the otherworld?”
“No, but my home is.”
By the time they got back to the house, a few of the dogs had returned. There was also a handful of tall men waiting for them, all dark-skinned with lean faces and long black hair except for a pair with hair the colour of a yellow rez dog’s fur.
“I think we’ll need the big pot for dinner tonight,” Aggie said.